Sunday, July 29, 2007

Not an oblong, as one would envision, nor deep grooves in the oakwhere long ago sons of fierce families carved names in heraldicscript or whittled the day down to dusk, but rectilinearand smooth like everyday streets that repeat and repeat and are numberedneatly so even the dumb can finger their ways down tar and arrivegroomed and smiling on the burst of nine. There is no tradition here,and none asked, for bobbing at twin ends of the economyexecutives and the "team," as they like to address us, seeeye to eye only on the waxed surface of the wood,and down below, among the struts and wedges, among the miterjoints and the mortises, the truth shuffles like Jim Crow in the backof a bus. That we eat rare beef together and chitchatin the holes between figures, that we accept commonalityto a variable level, seems almost to attest to a kind of humanness,as if the mothers in us were bent deep together in an autumnharvest, or the cock crowing in the mist predicted a sort of hope.

Yet there is nothing sacred here— not a hammer or word, not a clerkascending a tree—but a structure and order that are neither theories nor lawsnor syllogism of a playful inventor but compel obedience bytheir lack of insistence. It is something we know— that behavior replaces ritual—that the bowels remain silent—that the weather in the seatsof our pants is tempered by protocol. Outside are the leavesbeckoning and a pink terrace is lit up like coralin the autumn sun. Here there is nothing living but accommodation—no mystery, no intent, no derivations—but the bald,unfathomable hours that seem to glide from coffee to coffee.

(This poem appeared in Prairie Schoonerand was reprinted in the anthology For a Living—The Poetry of Work, University of Illinois Press.)

About Me

Writer, poet, ex-editor, loner, disident, ex-theaterist (M.A. in Theatre), ex-college adjunct instructor, father, New Yorker (born and raised in Brooklyn), lives now in duller-than-tofu NJ. My poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Stand (U.K.—6 poems), College English (4 poems), The Literary Review, Prairie Schooner (2), The Minnesota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Confrontation, Poetry East, The Harvard Advocate (with typo rendering poem a vegetable), Permafrost, Journal of New Jersey Poets, New Collage, Perspective, Ironwood, Grasslimb, South Florida POetry Journal, and in the anthology For a Living—The Poetry of Work (University of Illinois Press). Blogs: stanmarcus.blogspot.com (satirical microessays on everyday confusion), stanmarcus2.blogspot.com (serious poetry), and, blog on a trip I took to China in the 1976. Another blog, called Stan Marcus: Chronicles, deals with (in prose) . . . whatever is on my mind. It's at stanmarcus4.blogspot.com.